‘ STRANGER THINGS’ RETURNS
Season 2 is here with monsters and maybe #Justiceforbarb.
I’m sorry, this is nerdy.” Ross Duffer is apologising for him and his twin brother, Matt, geeking out. The 33-year-old creators of Netflix’s Stranger Things are in a Hollywood post-production studio putting the final touches on the highly anticipated second season of their horror-homage hybrid with a joyous energy, as if they’ve conquered the final level of The Legend of Zelda. For an hour, the pair of pop-culture obsessives dissect individual shots with their colourist, Skip Kimball (Avatar), and throw out the classics that inspired the visual look of some of this season, like Blade Runner, Escape From New York and Tim Burton’s original Batman.
The Duffers are nerds, though, in the best possible way. In fact, it’s their superpower. Eleven (breakout star Millie Bobby Brown) may be able to lift government kidnapper vans, but the Duffers can rattle off the biggest movies of the summer of 1984 without blinking. Their passion for pop culture fuelled the creation of Stranger Things, a tribute to the movies they loved as kids in North Carolina (think E.T., The Goonies and Stand by Me). “Obviously they’re nerdy, but that’s what makes them so cool,” says Brown. “It makes [ Stranger Things] so authentic because it comes from their hearts.”
The Duffers’ canny but old-fashioned combination of emotion and thrills drove the series—about four small-town Indiana friends who find themselves dealing with a portal to a different dimension—to monster-level success after its 2016 premiere. “I don’t think Netflix thought it was going to be as huge as it became, but neither did we,” concedes Matt. The streaming service doesn’t release ratings, but producers say Netflix has made it known how important Things is, even if it hasn’t given the cast Porsches the way US network NBC did for Will & Grace back in 1999. “We don’t know what our viewer numbers are, but we know what Netflix’s stock price is and where it’s been,” says executive
producer Shawn Levy. “We know the licensing and merchandising deals that are expanding with every month, and we see the amount of clicks and ink devoted to the show. Netflix absolutely acknowledges that the cultural footprint of Stranger Things is big and deep. They do shower us with love and gratitude … just not Porsches yet.”
The sports cars may come once the bigger, badder second instalment of Things drops on Oct. 27. “It’s Stranger Things but just sorta hopped up a little,” says Finn Wolfhard, who plays Mike Wheeler. “It’s almost like Season 1 was drinking a Coke and Season 2 they drank a Red Bull.” The Duffers have envisioned the return as not so much a second season but a movie sequel. To that end, when the show comes back it will have the cinematic moniker Stranger Things 2. “When we started describing it as a sequel, Netflix was like, ‘Don’t do that, because sequels are known to be bad,’ ” says Matt. “I was like, ‘ Yes, but what about T2 and Aliens and Toy Story 2 and Godfather II?’ ” Now Netflix is preparing to relaunch the series with a full-throttle blitz worthy of a James Cameron extravaganza. The Things team just needs to live up to those giant expectations. “It’s definitely daunting,” says Levy. “The love for this show is so rabid.” But the Duffers are confident that viewers will be more than satisfied with their return to the Upside Down. Says Matt: “We want people to argue about what season is better. I want the debate. I want the Toy Story debate!”
Things debuted on July 15, 2016, and quickly became the show that everyone was talking about at weekend barbecues. The Duffers worship at the altar of Steven Spielberg, and his influence is all over Things. Much like that director’s blockbusters of the ’80s, the series crosses demographics with its mixture of scares, heart and bowl cuts. Season 1 found a motley crew of small-town residents, including frazzled single mother Joyce Byers ( Winona Ryder) and boozy chief of police Hopper (David Harbour), dealing with a major bummer: a government lab doing super-sketchy experiments had unleashed a nasty, bloodthirsty creature, nicknamed the Demogorgon, that kidnapped Joyce’s young son Will (Noah Schnapp). Will was eventually rescued and the Demogorgon defeated by superpowered Eleven, who seemed to also perish in the fight. In short, it was simultaneously the freshest and most nostalgic thing on television.
Spoofs on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Saturday Night Live soon followed. Several of the stars—brown, Caleb Mclaughlin, and Gaten Matarazzo— performed at the 2016 Emmys. Even supporting characters, like sartorially challenged Barb (Shannon Purser) and big-haired d-bag Steve (Joe Keery), became prime meme-fuellers. The series won a SAG award for best drama ensemble in January and was nominated for 18 Emmys this year (it won five).
But as the world was bingeing Stranger Things more than a year ago, the Duffers were quietly at work plotting Season 2. While the official green light wasn’t announced until the end of August 2016, the creators had already had talks with Netflix about where the show would go. Says Matt: “The good news is that a lot of what we wanted to see or what we responded to, that seems to be what the audience responded to. Like we fell in love with Gaten, and there were aspects, like Barb, we were already planning to deal with. It felt like there was a nice alignment between what we wanted to see and what other people wanted to see.”
But the audience is in for a shock with the very first scene of Things 2, which travels outside small-town America. “I liked opening the show in a place not in Hawkins, in an urban environment,” teases Matt. “I want people thinking maybe they’ve clicked on the wrong show and then boom, you realise, ‘Oh, we’re still in it.’ But it’s all about broadening and expanding our world.”
After the detour, Things 2 settles back into life in Hawkins. While the first season started off with the shock of Will being abducted, the Duffers admit that Things 2 is more of a slower climb, purposefully. “I think that allows us to structure something that’s going to function better as a nine-hour piece,” says Matt. “What we wanted is a steady build.
Every episode gets a little crazier until 9, and it’s just out of control.”
The second season takes place around Halloween in 1984, a year after the first season’s events. Will is back with his buddies, but he’s experiencing PTSD, including visions of the Upside Down containing the season’s major new threat, a giant arachnid-like creature that the kids dub “the shadow monster.” “No-one has ever gone through this before,” explains Schnapp. “So he’s confused, he’s scared and he’s trying to cope with everything. You’ll learn in the second season how the Upside Down is affecting him and how it’s kind of changing him.”
Since inter-dimensional visions aren’t a topic you can broach with your local paediatrician, Joyce returns to the lab where it all began and finds Dr Owens (Paul Reiser), the suspiciously friendly replacement for Dr Brenner (Matthew Modine). “He’s very well aware that he’s walking into a community that is understandably suspicious of him—given what the government has done—and so he knows that he has to be extra smooth and extra aware,” says Reiser, whose casting is a homage to his duplicitous role in Aliens. Ryder’s goal this season was making sure that it didn’t look like Joyce was selling out her son. Says the actress: “Initially, when we were gearing up to do Season 2, I was like, ‘ Why would she still be in that town? She would have gotten the hell outta there!’ I really wanted it to come across that she was incredibly reluctant, but basically she had no money and Will was having episodes and they somehow convinced her.” But Joyce does have one bright spot in her life: new boyfriend and Radioshack employee Bob (Sean Astin). “He really loves her,” says Astin, who’s long been a favourite of the Duffers for his performance in The Goonies. “He’s just a good, decent guy where there’s nothing heavy about him.” But Astin does say that, as a fan of Season 1, it’s a little awkward to disappoint viewers hoping for a Joyce and Hopper relationship aka Jopper. Quips Astin, “I mean, I was waiting for her and Hopper to get together.”
Speaking of Hawkins’s chief of police, he’s really got no time for romance. Hopper is attempting to keep the events of last year a secret to protect all involved, but starts to suspect the slimy terror isn’t over when Hawkins’s pumpkin patches all begin to mysteriously rot. “He has the added stress of some people knowing what happened in the town and some people who do not,” says Harbour. “So he has to be the guy who has to put the cover on a lot of these pots. He’s dealing with that, but then also he sort of sold out Eleven, in a way, to find Will, so I think he feels guilt. As we saw at the end of Season 1, he puts those Eggos in the box. So I think he’s headed towards a deeper involvement with her in some way.”
Giving off major Gremlins vibes, Dustin (Matarazzo) will bond with a tiny slimy creature he finds at the bottom of his rubbish bin. But this thing ain’t no hamster. “I love the stories of a boy and his monster,” says Matt. “That, to me, is a classic story.” Adds Matarazzo of the
“A lot of what we responded to the audience responded to” —Matt Duffer
“pollywog,” his new CG co-star: “It was really cool. It’s hard, though, because when you’re acting by yourself it can definitely be pretty stressful and hard to figure out.”
Dustin will also find himself in a bit of a love triangle when he and Lucas (Mclaughlin) fall for new girl Max (Sadie Sink), who causes some fractures within the friend group. “Lucas thinks she’s so pretty, and he wants her to be a part of the crew, but Mike’s not really having it,” says Mclaughlin. Adding more conflict to the town is Max’s bad-boy brother, Billy (Dacre Montgomery). “There’s something sinister about Billy,” says Montgomery. “Prior to shooting I had about three weeks before I had to go to Atlanta, so I watched a lot of Jack Nicholson’s work.”
Things’ other major love triangle—between high schoolers Nancy (Natalia Dyer), Steve, and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton)—will grow even more complicated as Nancy struggles with survivor’s remorse over the death of her best friend, Barb. “Especially this season, Barb’s a big part of Nancy’s storyline and that drive to—i don’t know how to say it otherwise—to find justice,” says Dyer, referencing the #Justiceforbarb hashtag that was inspired by the Season 1 killing. “There are a lot of loose ends there that Nancy feels need to be addressed.”
Her brother, Mike, is equally moody (the Duffers and Wolfhard refer to the character this year as “Emo Mike”), believing that his first love, Eleven, perished after defeating the Demogorgon. But—non-spoiler alert—the girl who loves frozen breakfast treats is back. As shown in the trailer for Things 2, Eleven returns from the Upside Down … but that’s about all we can say. Well, we can also say that Episode 7 is an Eleven-centric chapter. “It’s more coming-of-age,” says Brown of this year’s story. “She’s learning how to be a normal teenager. It’s something that I’m going through right now, so it’s pretty relatable,” she adds with a laugh.
While many of these story lines operate independently, things will converge as the season progresses. “It’s all connected to this singular threat, which is tied in to this shape that Will sees in the sky,” says Ross. The final two chapters aim to deliver Spielbergian spectacle. Says Matt, “We wanted it to be a two-hour blockbuster movie.”
Netflix has yet to officially approve a third instalment of Stranger Things, but planning is already underway. (Contrary to a report, Levy says he’s heard nothing yet of the cast wanting to renegotiate their contracts.) “We’re starting to think about it now,” says Ross. “It’s hard. You don’t want to get caught trying and failing to top yourself. It’s not necessarily that bigger is always better.” Adds Matt, “I think at the end of the season you’ll see where the show might go eventually.” While Ross recently said the series would go only four seasons, the Duffers and Levy now say they’re open to a fifth. Says Ross: “There’s going to come a point where it becomes ‘ Why aren’t these people leaving Hawkins?’ Like we’re going to stretch credibility. It wasn’t intended to be a seven-season thing.”
The Duffers mostly just want Things 2 to be included in the conversation alongside sequels that match or surpass the original, like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. “That’s why I’ll stand up for Temple of Doom— they swung! At least you’re taking a big swing,” says Matt. But don’t worry, no-one is getting their heart ripped out or eating monkey brains this season. “We don’t have anything that gross,” he says. “Maybe that’s next year—we’ll be really gross.”
Stranger things have happened.
“She’s learning how to be a normal teenager” —Millie Bobby Brown on Eleven